Re: version numbers: 0.41, 0.42, Gtkmm, and 0.50
Hi,
wrt. to the recent discussion about gtkmm i would like to humbly suggest the use of libglade or even libglademm when moving the ui-related parts of the codebase to c++. As briefly discussed on jabber today this should further simplify the code and make tweaking of the dialogs easy. Additionally it's the suggested way for gnome-related software.
Thanks for your time, - Rob
Thanks for the suggestion Robert. Actually, Glade was suggested early on with Gtkmmification but after some consideration we determined not to do it, with reasoning listed on the Gtkmmification page.
Recently, I noticed some additional comments on that page re-recommending Glade, so I spent an evening trying it out, to see if the earlier assumptions were still valid. I cut my teeth on GUI layout tools (with Motif via UIM/X, MFC via MSVC, and more), so am quite aware of the benefits (and drawbacks) such tools can potentially bring.
I did not find that glade (at least, the version that comes with Gentoo) is sufficient to what I would expect. I did not find what it produced to be simple or easy to tweak. I fussed with it a lot to get it to generate Gtkmm code, and played with all the preference settings, but simply could not get it to do what I needed.
Of course, my perception could be wrong, and I could be missing out on something truly magical, but if so I think I need a much stronger sales job; what I've seen so far has not been terribly impressive.
(In addition, one of the things we plan to accomplish with the new codebase is to be able to enforce certain behavioral/style/layout requirements at root-class levels. This will be very handy when coding a new dialog since you can simply inheret the style from a base class. I'm skeptical that we could get the same level of capability out of Glade.)
Bryce
On Mon, 3 Jan 2005, Robert Staudinger wrote:
Hi,
wrt. to the recent discussion about gtkmm i would like to humbly suggest the use of libglade or even libglademm when moving the ui-related parts of the codebase to c++. As briefly discussed on jabber today this should further simplify the code and make tweaking of the dialogs easy. Additionally it's the suggested way for gnome-related software.
Thanks for your time,
- Rob
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I did not find that glade (at least, the version that comes with Gentoo) is sufficient to what I would expect. I did not find what it produced to be simple or easy to tweak. I fussed with it a lot to get it to generate Gtkmm code, and played with all the preference settings, but simply could not get it to do what I needed.
Hmm, maybe it wasn't clear from my first post that by mentioning libglade i of course meant loading the dialogs from the xml description. Code-generation is rarely used in the gnome world nowadays AFAIK.
I very much agree to Murray's comments on the gtkmmification wiki page, but of course the issues with custom widgets are valid. If i'm not mistaken gnumeric uses a mixed approach by having the boilerplate stuff loaded from the xml-file and inserting the custom widgets by hand.
The comment about libglade not allowing for dynamic changes of the UI does not hold IMHO. All the widged loaded when parsing the .glade file are fully valid gtk(mm) instances and can be acted upon just as on any widget created by own code.
Of course it would add an extra dependency but at the advantage of clearly reducing application code. Additionally through it's widespread use in gnome the library is very well tested and definitely reliable.
Thanks, - Rob
On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 10:37 +0100, Robert Staudinger wrote:
Hmm, maybe it wasn't clear from my first post that by mentioning libglade i of course meant loading the dialogs from the xml description. Code-generation is rarely used in the gnome world nowadays AFAIK.
Actually, I have an interest in seeing Glade used. And I plan on experimenting with Glade in the Gtkmm codebase.
I've read up about custom widgets, because we are making a handful of custom/compound widgets for Inkscape's Gtkmm work (Labelled, Scalar, ScalarUnit, Toolbox, NotebookPage, etc.). Our custom widgets would need a Glade-specific constructor, for libglade to be able to create them via the XML description.
We're already using other technologies that simplify/reduce application- specific code, namely UIManager (menus, toolbars, and popups generated from XML description) and AccelMap (keybindings generated from Scheme description). If we can use Glade as seamlessly as we're using these other technologies, it would be a benefit for Inkscape.
I don't know how possible it will be, but I, for one, am definitely going to experiment with it and give it a serious run for its money.
On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 01:49:38PM -0600, Derek P. Moore wrote:
I don't know how possible it will be, but I, for one, am definitely going to experiment with it and give it a serious run for its money.
I'm all for parsed UIs! That's what made UI design so quick with Mozilla, if I understand correctly.
On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, Derek P. Moore wrote:
On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 10:37 +0100, Robert Staudinger wrote:
Hmm, maybe it wasn't clear from my first post that by mentioning libglade i of course meant loading the dialogs from the xml description. Code-generation is rarely used in the gnome world nowadays AFAIK.
Actually, I have an interest in seeing Glade used. And I plan on experimenting with Glade in the Gtkmm codebase.
I don't know how possible it will be, but I, for one, am definitely going to experiment with it and give it a serious run for its money.
This could be good - sounds a little like XUL. However before we commit to taking this path I'd like to give it a really solid review. For example we especially need to check into dependency issues of libglade availability on Win32 and OSX.
Bryce
On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, Bryce Harrington wrote:
I did not find that glade (at least, the version that comes with Gentoo) is sufficient to what I would expect. I did not find what it produced to be simple or easy to tweak. I fussed with it a lot to get it to generate Gtkmm code, and played with all the preference settings, but simply could not get it to do what I needed.
Something to consider is using glademm, which reads the glade XML files at runtime instead.
I don't think it solves most of the problems with glade, but I consider glademm a far better option than using glade for code generation.
-mental
participants (5)
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Bryce Harrington -
Derek P. Moore -
Kees Cook -
MenTaLguY -
Robert Staudinger